Building in Green - William McDonough

Building in Green

"Building in Green

Can China move 400 million people to its cities without wreaking environmental havoc? Eco-urban designer William McDonough says yes—and Beijing is listening.

By Sarah Schafer and Anne Underwood, Newsweek International, Sept. 26 - Oct. 3, 2005

When American architect and industrial designer William McDonough visited the dusty Chinese village of Huangbaiyu, the villagers greeted him and his entourage of U.S. executives with a marching band, red carpet and fake red flowers to pin on their lapels. One anxious county official wearing a new blue dress shirt, still creased from the packaging, ordered volunteers to

hold up an inflatable rainbow arch that had begun to sag. Foreign delegations often swing through rural towns, but McDonough is not just another big shot looking for a glimpse of "ordinary Chinese life." He's co-chair—together with Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Deng Nan—of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. And he plans to change life in Huangbaiyu—and, for that matter, across China. "We hope whatever we do will make you happy," he announced to the curious crowd.

Huangbaiyu is set to become an experiment in ecologically balanced living, and McDonough is the visionary behind it. He and a team of Chinese and Americans have been charged with turning the village into a model of environmentally sound living. The team has begun construction on the first two demonstration homes and expect to build about 50 more by November to house some of the town's 400 families. If all goes as planned, families will move into a town center, increasing the amount of land available for farming, rather than live scattered about as they are now.

It's a challenge, to say the least. McDonough's team can spend only $3,500 per house. To pull it off, they're using local labor and local materials, all of which will either biodegrade safely or be completely recyclable. To avoid the pollution that is released during the firing of bricks, the walls are made of pressed-earth blocks. Between the blocks is straw, a byproduct of the local rice harvest that would otherwise go to waste. Walls are a half-meter thick, so houses are well insulated and won't need a lot of heating. Solar panels on the rooftops provide electricity and heated water. "We're doing everything with nothing," McDonough says.

China has a lot riding on the Huangbaiyu experiment—and so does the rest of the world. Beijing is now orchestrating an industrial revolution, hoping to telescope into a few decades what it took Western countries a century or two to accomplish. The plan is to move 400 million people—about half the rural population—into urban centers by 2030. Doing so will require expanding towns into cities and even building new metropolises from scratch. That also means creating education, security and economic policies to help the masses adjust to the speedy transition from an agrarian to an urban society. How China manages this transformation will have a huge impact on the country's—indeed, the world's—environment, and its social stability. McDonough's projects in the village of Huangbaiyu and six major cities are China's biggest experiment in ecologically sound development. If all goes well, his brand of ecodesign could serve as a model for China's new urbanism. "China wasted 200 years already," says Nie Meisheng, president of the China Housing Industry Association. "We have to catch up."

It's too early, of course, to say whether the plan will succeed or fail. McDonough has completed designs for the six new districts in cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou plus the village, but he's so far built mainly parks, waterways and roads. The goal is to have the first of the city sites ready for habitation in a few years. Although his plan has won the support of China's leaders—President Hu Jintao likes to repeat phrases from the Chinese translation of McDonough's book, "Cradle to Cradle"—the project relies on funding that is being raised by local governments and is not assured. And McDonough must first overcome a thousand gritty realities of life in China that could sidetrack his vision.

It makes a certain sense that China is turning to McDonough for an urban design vision. He believes that industrial cities could be far more efficient than they are now if they were designed from the ground up with ecological principles in mind instead of taking shape piecemeal. This notion would be impractical in most countries but could work in China, where the government has the wherewithal to impose its plans on citizens.

Efficiency is also key to relieving one of China's biggest roadblocks to modernization—its demand for energy. The Chinese use three times more energy per square meter to heat and cool buildings than Europeans and Americans, according to professor Yuan Bin at Beijing's Tsinghua University school of architecture. China is already the second largest energy consumer in the world, after the United States. Although only 23 million Chinese own cars, China produces 16 percent of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions and is set to overtake the United States as the world's biggest producer of CO2 within 30 years. If each person in China used as much energy as an average American, they would swallow up the world's entire current supply of petroleum. "China cannot consume energy like the U.S. because we have 1.3 billion people," says Yuan Bin.

If McDonough's method could be summed up in a phrase, it might be to leave nothing to chance. In each of the six cities, he is starting with a thorough examination of the land to be developed. He figures out how rainwater runs off and enters aquifers, how animals migrate, what plants grow where. He studies sunlight angles and wind patterns. Then he sketches in parks, which interconnect so citizens can walk or ride bicycles from one to the next and wildlife can carry on without disruption. Next comes the plan for the infrastructure, beginning with the angle of the streets. He slants them at a 15-degree angle to the winds in order to break up cold winter blasts and help keep city air clean. And orienting them on a diagonal rather than a rigid east-west grid also maximizes the sunlight that reaches apartments year-round. The cities are zoned for mixed residential, commercial and industrial use to ensure that transportation connects residences to the workplaces. Shops will be on the ground floor, residences above, and the rooftops will have farm plots. Bridges over the streets will connect the plots. The farmers will live downstairs.

Energy efficiency will be maximized through new types of building materials and a solar-powered energy grid. McDonough has begun by developing a polystyrene made by BASF without ozone-depleting chloro-fluorocarbons but with excellent insulating qualities. "Buildings can be heated and cooled for next to nothing," he says. "And they'll be silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won't hear them." He's also working on new toilet bowls that are so slippery you can flush them with a light mist. Bamboo wetlands nearby would purify the waste, and the bamboo could be harvested and used for wood.

McDonough would like to see China's cities powered chiefly by solar panels. China, he says, is uniquely qualified to get solar power off the ground by virtue of its scale. "We're not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs," he says. "Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them."

McDonough's ideas have worked well, albeit on a smaller scale, in the United States. He's designed green developments for communities and corporations, including the Gap and Ford. The headquarters for the clothing retailer the Gap in California has a roof with vegetation on it, a raised floor for better heating and cooling, and makes good use of daylight. The building exceeds California's energy requirements by 30 percent; Pacific Gas and Electric named it the second most energy-efficient building in the state.

In China, McDonough's plans for all six city districts have passed the government's standards test; three have gotten the green light. In Zhejiang province, the group has integrated the city of Ningbo's water system, creating wetlands that help conserve rainwater and protect animal and plant life. In Jinan, McDonough and his team are trying to clean up land contaminated by toxins from a steel plant. Outside Chengdu, in Sichuan province, they're trying to preserve an ancient landscape with old trees that would otherwise be leveled to make room for buildings and roads. "We're just at the beginning," McDonough said. "If you really want to see something, give us a few years."

Many prominent companies have gotten involved. Vermeer Manufacturing Co. of Iowa contributed an earth-block press for Huangbaiyu. Hewlett-Packard is donating computers for the schools. BP has given solar collectors. Intel is sponsoring an American anthropology Ph.D. student, Shannon May, to live in the model village for 14 months. May will study local habits and report back to Intel so it can figure out how to design products for rural Chinese. She'll also work on her dissertation, which will explore "the dissonances between what the Americans hope to accomplish here and what actually happens on the ground." The whole world will be eager to see the results.

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